Kennedy, former chairman of the Arizona Super Bowl host committee, said he used the bid book to drive home a point about hosting the big game.

It's a business – competitive, costly and, it turns out, increasingly advantageous for the NFL.

"You have to comply,'' Kennedy told USA TODAY Sports, "or make best efforts at complying with the specifications set forth.''

Be prepared to pay up, too.

Arizona, drawing from private and public funds, will spend about $30 million to host the 2015 Super Bowl, to be played Sunday in Glendale, Ariz. That's a relative bargain. San Francisco, the host for the 50th Super Bowl next year in Santa Clara, Calif., expects to spend more than $50 million. Last year, New Jersey and New York spent a combined $70 million hosting the game that was played in East Rutherford, N.J.

"I think it's a better buy for a community today than it was before,'' said Kennedy, who was part of Arizona's bid when it spent $5 million to host the game in Tempe in 1996 and when it spent $18 million to host the game in 2008. "The benefits are enormous.''

But there's concern in cities such as New Orleans, which has hosted 10 Super Bowls and is tied with Miami as the city that has hosted the most.

"The cost to cities for all of these major events has skyrocketed in the past 15 years,'' said Doug Thornton, regional vice president for the company that manages the New Orleans Superdome. "Soon certain cities may priced out.''

NFL spokesman Brian McCarthy declined to discuss specifics, but he said the requirements in the Super Bowl bid package are comparable to hosting a national political convention.

The cost-benefit analysis for host cities has been the subject of economic studies — and even those glowing projections are debated — which estimate the game has an impact of $200 million to $500 million on the local, regional and state economies in which the game is played. Super Bowl host committees, the non-profits organizations that represent host cities and their surrounding regions, commissioned these studies that, in turn, drove up the cost to host the game.

That's because the NFL saw the studies, too.

"That demonstrated to cities that there was a great advantage to hosting Super Bowl, beyond just bragging rights,'' said Frank Supovitz, who managed the game for the NFL between 2005 and 2014. "There was a real revenue opportunity there for them.

"Recognizing that, we were able to create a more competitive environment and more of a business opportunity for the NFL in terms of capturing some of the additional economic advantage.''

Humble beginnings

The NFL didn't always have such leverage.

There were tens of thousands of empty seats at the first Super Bowl, played in 1967 at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum. That next year, the NFL moved the game to Miami — not because of any inducements, but rather because Pete Rozelle, then commissioner of the NFL, thought football-loving snowbirds might drive up ticket sales.

"There were no long discussions with owners groups over these venue decisions because it was a low priority for them,'' Joe Browne, a longtime NFL senior advisor, said by email. "They were still spending their time and energy on realignment and many of the major issues surrounding the 1966 merger (between the NFL and AFL). It was pretty much left to Pete and our office to decide.

In 1978, when the game was played in New Orleans, the league still was sharing profits. Denzil Skinner, general manager of the company then-managing the Superdome, said the stadium got 10 percent of gross revenue from ticket sales and the NFL reimbursed the stadium for all out-of-pocket costs, such as vendors, ticket takers and security guards.

"There was no such thing as a bid book,'' Skinner said. "We simply went in to meet with Pete Rozelle and presented our proposal. …Things obviously have really changed.''

No one tracked those changes as closely as Jim Steeg, who took over responsibility for the game in 1979 and is credited as a key figure in helping grow the game into the biggest spectacle in American sports.

The competition between cities wanting the Super Bowl had grown, and they looked for ways to sway the owners, who had taken greater interest in who hosted the game – and how much they'd make.

The year Steeg joined the NFL, a Miami restauranteur involved in the bid for a Super Bowl spearheaded a push that led to the Florida state legislature waiving a state tax on tickets for the Super Bowl and college bowl games. Three years later, the NFL played the 1982 Super Bowl free of charge in the Pontiac Silverdome outside of Detroit.

Philadelphia offered a straight cash payment of $2 million for the 1987 game. Not enough.

Joe Robbie, late owner of the Miami Dolphins, built a new stadium that opened in 1987. Bingo. Super Bowl returned to Miami in 1989.

After Rankin M. Smith Sr., late owner of the Atlanta Falcons, helped lobby for the construction of the Georgia Dome, the big game came to Atlanta in 1994.

"Then you kind of got into a one-up, what can the next guy do?'' Steeg said.

Steeg said in his final year handling the game, the NFL made $275 million on the Super Bowl, including broadcast revenue.

But then, soon after Steeg left and Supovitz arrived in 2005, the NFL got more aggressive. When cities started offering to provide facilities free of charge, for example, the NFL made it a requirement.

"It made sense to institutionalize it into the bid package,' Supovitz said. "Because if everybody's doing it, then everybody can do it, and you might as well make it a requirement."

NFL investment grows

As the NFL's requirements grew, so did the Super Bowl host committees budgets — with the money used to pay game-related expenses and the committee's own operational expenses. Supovitz said the budget range for host committees grew from as little as $12 million to as much as $50 million between his joining the league in 2005 and departing last year.

Supovitz declined to disclose the league's budget for the Super Bowl. But he said the league's expenses far exceeds the money it gets from the host committees.

"It helps, but it's not remotely close to what the NFL spends,'' Supovitz said. "When you take a look at the enormity of all of the events and all of the facilities, it wouldn't have happened at $12 million and it wouldn't happen at $50 million. It's well in excess of that. The NFL undertakes the vast majority of costs.''

But the costs aren't always clearly defined. Minneapolis, for example, will host 2018 Super Bowl. The host committee's budget will not reflect what was most crucial to securing the game: the state legislature approved nearly $500 million in public funds to help build a $1 billion stadium for the Minnesota Vikings that indirectly enriches the NFL. Yet Minneapolis Super Bowl host committee faced compeititve bidding process and learned the truth about hosting the modern-day Super Bowl.